This document examines the geographic distribution of employed individuals across Romania, the implications, and recommendations. Under optimal conditions, cities concentrate economic resources and human talent in a virtuous cycle of increasing urbanization... See More +This document examines the geographic distribution of employed individuals across Romania, the implications, and recommendations. Under optimal conditions, cities concentrate economic resources and human talent in a virtuous cycle of increasing urbanization that generates a diverse range of opportunities, enabling people to find better-paying jobs, companies to recruit employees with the right set of skills, and capital and ideas to flow across space more efficiently. The benefits of agglomeration kick in rapidly, increasing the attraction of cities as living and working spaces. However, in the short term, uneven development across regions is both a normal and an inevitable phenomenon. Regrettably, many policymakers tend to resist growing internal divergence, trying to artificially spread the benefits of growth evenly across space. In practice, however, such policies rarely have the intended effects, often wasting resources and slowing down the economy. The basic solution for lagging areas is instead to connect people living there to opportunities in growing cities and offer them access to basic infrastructure for encouraging short-term working mobility and discouraging depopulation/ peremptory migration in favor of intra- and inter-county commuting. In the long run, convergence in living standards will occur as benefits from leading areas spill over to surrounding communities and people who had left lagging areas bring back capital, jobs, and ideas.
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